Over the course of the three days it took to gather everything I needed to do a story like this one, I shot both stills and video, recording both interviews as well as B-roll footage and wrote both, the print magazine piece for Texas Agriculture, a video magazine style piece for our programming on the RFD-TV Network, collected audio segments to build a three-part Radio news series using said interviews and ambient sounds from the trip for the TFB Radio Network, as well as few minute-and-a-half long web clips (outtakes from the trip, out in the field form the pear burning, all sorts of stuff from the cattle auction yards in Hallettsville, even a comedic section, full of witticisms I heard on my travels), then used all those combined to build a website dedicated to the statewide Texas drought we all fought that year, that pulled drought headlines for every source produced here in Texas, just as the Aggie economist, Dr. Joe Outlaw, put his all his graduate students to work that year apparently to come up with some gargantuan sum (in the billions) of what impact the drought had on our state's economy in 2009, which instantly sent that website into viral proportions, quite literally overnight.
The views we got then swiftly propelled us to the No. 1 drought resource on the internet for the entire nine months we kept it running. Plus, it grew by leaps and bounds daily as it continued to actively search out include every piece in every piece in every form that it could, including everything from video, print and audio stories to images, music, art and even literature, you name it...
Come press contests in 2010, it won me my first national award for Best Video News Story, Best Website and an honorable mention for my radio work. I entered another print news story I did that same year that wound up winning that category, and the print news series I put together then, too, even landed another honorable mention, all of them national, of course. It focused on the need for lawmakers to sit down and overhaul the existing system with a comprehensive border policy reform, top to bottom, based on and controlled by the court system, so that the rule of law held sway, not who called the White House their home, by removing all incentive that promoted the near constant partisan lean it has now.
That was 2009, and of all the reforms we pressed lawmakers to remedy back then, sadly, not even one ever saw the light of day.
Regardless, though, this is the story that launched all that, and despite have all the elements in place and using the precise same quotes and material across the many platforms, this is a completely different story from all the rest, as they are from one another. It became any interesting study in what one was capable of doing with each of the individual forms...
